THE PERFORMANCE OF SERVQUAL TO MEASURE SERVICE QUALITY IN PRIVATE UNIVERSITY

The increasing number of educational services has caused a high competition in this industry. In Indonesia, the number of private universities is the highest compared to state universities and other forms of higher education institutions. Ability to predict factors that are important in providing educational services to achieve student satisfaction and make them loyal to the university is highly necessary. In this study, we investigated the main factors of service quality that affect student satisfaction and loyalty by collecting data from 319 students from London School of Public Relation in Jakarta. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to analyze the data through AMOS 24 statistical package. The findings indicated that the main factors influencing student satisfaction in private university are tangible and reliability consisting of: 1) comfortable lecture rooms, 2) adequate library facilities, 3) neat staff appearance, 4) non-discriminatory treatments provided by staff and lecturers, 5) high ability and knowledge provided by staffs and lecturers, and 6) appropriate academic services provided by the university. Student satisfaction with these factors would indirectly lead to loyalty to the university. Finally, service quality measurement through SERVQUAL was redundant as a model to measure the effect of service quality in educational service.